Christos Roshdiotsia
According to the Julian Calender today is Christmas. Commonly called Ukrainian Christmas it holds special meaning to me. To me Ukrainian Christmas was all about family, and food. Christmas Eve, the 6th of January, is when all the celebrating would take place in my family, and we'd gather - Aunts, Uncles, cousins - usually at my Granny's House for the traditional meatless meal. The meal would have 12 meatless dishes (representing the apostles I believe) and it was always a wonderful time. Often, I remember, carolers would come by, singing Ukrainian Christmas Carols.
Last night I wanted to have at least some of the dishes for supper, and not being as ambitious as Anita, and not having access to many of the ingredients (I can't remember the last time I saw a real beet) I settled on five. I would have loved to have Kutia (wheat boiled with honey and poppy seeds) but it will have to wait (I've wheat coming in the mail), so I settled on Koloch (a Christmas bread made in the form of a braided wreath), Holopchi (cabbage rolls), Perohy, Fasuli and Chesnock (mashed beans and garlic) and stewed dried fruit.
The holopchi turned out quite good, even though I much prefer sour cabbage rolls made with a soured cabbage, and the fruit wasn't bad except all I could get here were prunes. As for the rest...
There were no perohy at the stores, but that wouldn't be a problem. I mean I'm a cook, right? They were, without a doubt, the worst perohy I had ever had. Filling was nice, but the dough came out more like shoe leather than anything else. This is why I buy perohy. And a mix up with the burners on the stove (there's six of them and the knobs are not labeled. Mixup's happen far too frequently) meant that my cream dill sauce boiled way over, and was way too thick. There also wasn't enough sauce as one of my containers of cream was, uh, more like yogurt. Yuck.
As I didn't soak any beans beforehand I had to use canned beans for the fusuli. This being Arctic Bay, the only canned beans were baked beans and kidney beans. The kidney beans just weren't the same.
And the Kolach, sigh. I swear I followed the recipe, but the dough was way too wet. I believe that when it called for two cups of water it must have meant the cup of water that the yeast was dissolved in, mentioned earlier in the recipe, was included in those two cups. So I kept adding flour, and kept adding flour, until I finally had a usable dough. But it didn't seem to rise, and I abandoned it. Later in the evening I checked it had indeed rose, so I punched it down and made the kolach. It was huge! When it was baked I ended up with this massive, misshapen, mutant kolach. Did I mention it was huge? It actually was quite tasty (sweeter than I remember kolach from home) but uncooked in the centre. Mmm, crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy inside. Sigh.
I don't think the carolers are going to show up either.
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